One Utah

The U.S. military in Iraq is now in the midst of Operation Phantom Phoenix, a large-scale drive to maintain the initiative of the so-called “surge” by attacking insurgent strongholds near Baghdad, in Diyala and Salah ad-Din Provinces, and various points in between.
On day three of the offensive two B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighters carried [...]

This week I was called to serve Jury duty. I’ve never done it before - I’ve been called before but I didn’t actually have to show up. The process is pretty painless - you get a notice in the mail, complete an online form, then wait. You may or may not get [...]

It’s impossible to attend the Utah State Legislature year after year as I have without developing a sense of cynicism. The majority of Utah’s legislators strike me as well meaning but useless when it comes to actually effecting changing. The few commonsense proposals that actually make it to the floor are usually killed [...]

Via ThinkProgress:
Last night, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) took to the House floor to urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings into Vice President Cheney for high crimes and misdemeanors. Wexler, who has already acquired nearly 190,000 supporters through his website, explained his next steps:
Tomorrow, I will deliver these names [...]

The Secretary of State of New Hampshire has scheduled (PDF) a statewide recount of the paper ballots beginning on Wednesday, January 16, because presidential candidates Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Albert Howard requested it.
Let’s review the problem of the New Hampshire Primary vote-counting discrepancy.

About 80% of New Hampshire ballots were counted by Diebold/Premier [...]

Ralph Becker, as promised, proposed a Domestic Partner registry for Salt Lake City.  As far as I know, City Council hasn’t voted on it yet but I suspect it will pass. 
The DP registry is will allow health care, visitation rights, and some other rights of couples.
 Way to go Ralph!

During his current tour of the Middle East, President Bush contradicted his own policies so many times I began to wonder if the speech writers were out to get him. His cognitive dissonance confounded everybody back home in the USA and in the host countries (Israel, Palestine, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi [...]

I’m sorry I don’t have more time these days to pen my own screeds on the demise of America. Gibbons 2.0 will be a volume shorter.
This says it better antway.
By Eric Jong
Reprinted in full from Huffington Post
Posted there on January 13, 2008 | 06:52 PM (EST)
This column is not about Hillary vs. Obama [...]

There’s an old joke - The South is so damn peculiar because it’s filled with Southerners. The South is an intractable, unique, paradoxical, amazing and frustrating American region. It is the problem which the United States must find a way to solve and which we have yet to solve. The (perhaps apocryphal) story of LBJ [...]

The flood of letters in both the Trib and D-News (written by people who don’t live in Salt Lake City) celebrating the end of Rocky’s term as mayor struck me as unsurprising and ill-informed.  It seems many of the folks who live in surrounding cities still haven’t figured out that Salt Lakers like Rocky Anderson, what [...]

U.S. and Iraqi forces are in the midst of “Operation Phantom Phoenix,”* a wide-scale offensive aimed at eliminating pockets of insurgents (which the military invariably refers to as “al-Qaeda”) north and south of Baghdad. The operation involves thousands of troops, including seven battalions of US Army and Marines.

A new tactic is in play this time, [...]

Nothing can be proven, and if past elections are any indication, nothing will ever be proven. It seems that 81 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary were counted electronically. The counts were done on Diebold (now known as Premier Election Solutions) op-scan machines– the exact same ones that were hacked [...]